Welp, it finally happened: my girlfriend has been sick for the last... 5 days or so? and I've managed to avoid getting it up till now. As is, it's a mild sickness, but i'm definitely sick. Sitting in the living room, cat sleeping on a chair, looking out the window at the rain, listening to the thunder. It's quite soothing. Sipping on some Gypsy Cold Care tea, which works pretty well, at least in the short term.
I've managed to totally finish all the homework associated with Observation 1. I've got half a page left to write for Observation 2. Then I've got a few pages to fill out for Observation 3, and I'm done with the first half of the big assignments. I've got a quick timeline to create, one or two other little things, and then a massive undertaking in the form of the last week of homework from last summer. That will likely take three full days, doing nothing but that, and by the end I'll have a google document that is over a hundred pages long. That part is probably not going to be started until my job teaching ends in two weeks. At which point I will have one week to do all remaining homework, get myself packed, and drive cross country to San Diego.
It's probably a good thing my girlfriend will be gone for most of that time as otherwise she might feel it rude, how I was spending every waking moment working.
And then when I get there, it's gonna stay at about that pace until the end of classes, second week in August. I don't know how much time I get from then to professional development starting up again, but I'll be trying not to make the same mistake as last time, and get my final weeks homework done while it's fresh in my mind, but I'll probably be exhausted by the time I get back and need at least a few days of rest. Next year may be even more intense. I'll need to do more memorizing, I'll be student teaching for four weeks, and I'll be trying to prepare for the oral and written test that is required to gain my AMI diploma at the end of that third summer. Not to mention there are several corrections I need to make to previous homeworks, and and almost certainly there will be even more of those piling up this summer.
In a nutshell, I won't really get a break from this crazy pace until the end of two summers from now. Perhaps by then I'll just have acclimated to it?
Anyways, life is good, regardless. I'll get it done when I get it done. As is, I'm at least only slightly behind where I was hoping to be. The biggest challenge is maintaining focus and productivity through the end of eight to ten hour work days where all I'm doing is sitting at a computer, typing and thinking hard. I try to take regular short breaks to move and relax my brain, but there's still only so much I can do before it's taking me three times as long to get something done and I'm better off just sleeping and starting again the next day.
Anyhoo, that's what's on my mind this week, and likely for the next three weeks, until my summer training course starts again. Thank God for Memorial Day, though it's too bad I'm sick, and so functioning at significantly reduced capacity and productivity.
In any case, have a good week, and see ya next time
;-)
-Isaac
Monday, May 27, 2019
Monday, May 20, 2019
Birthday Blog 2019
OK, hello. It's apparently my birthday eve, as my girlfriend said this morning and a best friend said just a few minutes ago. That means tomorrow is my birthday. I've got a lot of things I want to cover, and I also have a lot of other, non-blog things that I want to get done, so I've done something unprecedented, and written an outline of my post, in the hopes that it would shorten the process. For your entertainment and titillation, I will place it now before you:
table of contents
zeigarnik effect -game of thrones
I like my new laptop, keyboard, writing experience, battery, newness
birthday - working
acting as if - not new age mumbo jumbo, but scientifically sound methodology specifically for me with regards to being productive, efficient, and well prioritized
state of the union: in gottman, and in my life:
-becoming a true adult, not a kid in a man suite
-profound fundamental change
finding things that work (for me specifically?) (gottman. if-then implementation intentions. cutting ties. Certain teachers.
being someone that works with things (teachable) relationship: check, job, check, spirituality, check. Now, working on quality
I suppose I should do something else that is precedent and proven useful, and set a timer for myself. one hour, starting now.
I keep reaching for my screen, because I've been using my ipad as my computer for the last while. the habit grows on you. It is simpler to click on the exact spot you want, rather than use a track-pad. tablets have laptops beat, in that respect. But tablet keyboards, or at least the ipad one, really are inferior. I think it has to do with the tablet being top heavy because the processing and everything is right behind the screen, but the keyboards for them are ugly, uncomfortable, and weird. They suffice, but they can't beat a good laptop keyboard, and you can get clamshell cases for them, but then you mine as well just get a laptop with a touchscreen. And the main issue continues to be that having an actual fully fledged operating system rather than a phone-like interface allows for so much more functionality, freedom, and flexibility. I think windows has that, but I like apple's OS better and I really like their aesthetic better.
Anyhoo, back to my outline.
I watched the very last episode of Game of Thrones last night. I'll try and avoid spoilers. What I want to talk about isn't the episode itself, which I enjoyed, but the philosophy behind me watching it, when I hadn't wanted a full season since the first one. and not even any intermittent episodes since maybe season 3.
a) I read the books, so I was further than I'd watched, at least, I think the books go up to at least season 5, maybe further.
b) I kind of dislike the author of the books, for making me wait so unreasonably long between books, and for going off on boring tangents so frequently. I feel like he kind of hates me too, in a general, hates all his readers sense. I mean, it seem like he wants to cause his readers pain, even within the story, tormenting the characters you like, making awful things happen to them, but it also just seems like he doesn't care about how much we want to find out what happens. He's off dicking around, writing at a snails pace, writing other side stories. I think he's even said he's kind of tired of writing the books. So he's lost any good will he earned from me for the first three books. As it stands I just wanted to find out what happens to the characters he made me care so much about, and learn the answers to all the questions and mysteries he's tempted us with.
I've often done this with series that I don't really like. I have an unreasonably strong attachment to finishing stories that grab me, bordering on addiction or compulsion, and though I can usually tame it for any short length of time needed to function as a normal human being, it will always resurface when I get some free time, urging me to find out what happens. This is why I end up with anger for various series, that seem to never end, or end poorly. I crave that conclusion.
A psychologist named this need to "close the loop" on things, the Zeigarnik effect (after themselves, I assume?) and it wasn't originally focused on story-telling, but tv and films often use it as a wickedly effective weapon, to keep us watching even though the show isn't that good. They keep ending on cliff-hangers, urging us to watch just one more episode, and then one more. If you have any unfinished task though, it ends up like this: a record skipping, repeating the same thing over and over, taking up your mental processing power, no matter how trivial. It's a useful tool if you use it for good, but also a great source of distraction in many cases.
So when I had the opportunity to finally close the loop on that long series, that I didn't even want to watch fully anyways, since it was so dark and negative and I try to keep my sensory and mental inputs healthy like I do with my food inputs, I took it. Also helped that I was just getting in on a group watching session that my girlfriend had been going to and it meant I got to cuddle for an hour and a half with her, after a long day's work (oh yes, I work on sundays. And Saturdays. Less than the weekdays, but still. That's my life. I got the morning off work for my birthday, and I'm just going to spend it doing more work, and be grateful for the opportunity.)
OK, how much time to I have left? how many topics? 33 minutes, 2 out of about 10. Yeps, that seems about right for me.
Oh, I guess I already kind of talked about this next one: I got a new (old) laptop. I'm doing so much traveling with my laptop, it really makes a difference, having something lighter, and with a better battery (my computer itself has told me, a while ago, that I really need to change the battery. I think I get less than an hour of time away from an outlet, if I'm doing anything using internet and processing power.)
I really like my strategy, of buying a laptop that's just a year or two old. The price goes down real quick those first few years, more than is warranted by the small drop in performance or the incremental upgrades happening year by year. Even better if it's a little cosmetically damaged. The first little ding saves you around 50 bucks. It seems like your paying closer to the actual price it's worth, rather than the added price you pay for newness.
In any case, the keyboard has a really satisfying click, and the sturdiness of it is a great relief after using my ipad for so long. Also, it so much lighter than my old laptop, it's much easier to pick it up in one hand and take it into the living room to type, where there's better like, (though also means I accessible to a cat that is sometimes kind of naughty in an attempt to get my attention. feels a bit like being a teacher. I'm amused by this, but not by the cat using the couch as a scratching post.
And the battery is normal, meaning I don't need to worry about running out halfway through what I'm doing. Very pleased. I guess this is my birthday present to myself. Next topic...
Ah, also already covered the fact that my birthday will be mostly working. morning off, work. afternoon, normal work. get home from school... I don't know what my girlfriend will want to do, she's got a big event that day, so I may just work more. At some point, I like to take time to reflect back on my year, enjoy my successes, and reflect on how I want to grow and what my goals are for the coming year. And I get up before the sunrise and go for a walk, with the intention of being open to the universe to give me a pertinent message for the coming year.
next...
I've been thinking about an idea I've heard from a number of different sources: "act as if... whatever you wanted to be true (especially about yourself) was already true." It sounds a bit new-agey, but it has some clear roots in cognitive and behavioral psychology. The current science seems to indicate that we have something like a little guy (gal) in our heads that see's what we're doing, and tries to make a coherent story out of it. That is, we do things, and then later we give those things reasons. In the same way, our stories about ourselves are not just self-fulfilling prophecies, they are created by our actions. The original thought was that we need to feel a certain way to act a certain way, but the actual research shows that we can actually just act a certain way, and we will then start to feel that way. almost like a justification for the actions. So the idea of acting "as if" you were, say, a confident businesswoman, is not just a "believe in it strong enough and it will be true" new-age self-help platitude. It's actually a totally valid way of changing self-perception. And obviously, it changes your actions.
Some people (me included) are hesitant to try acting a different way, "because that's being phoney." or "because that's just not who I am yet." and they are waiting until they feel like they are that kind of person, but that's just not very effective. We see what we do, and that shapes how we feel, so sometimes we just have to use our imagination to pretend we already are that kind of person. Not to try and lie to ourselves, that the imagination is real, but so we can figure out what we would be doing, if we were that kind of person, so we can do that action, now. Because doing the actions that imaginary super-us would do, is often the best way to change our view and feelings about ourselves, which then makes doing those actions easier and more natural. I could talk about the imposter syndrome, and how the highest achievers, like students accepted into Stanford, are the most susceptible to it, but I'll have to save that for another time.
This seems like a good segway into being a kid in an adult suit.
I think a lot of us "adults" feel like we kind a stopped aging mentally and are now just wearing these weird big person suits, hoping nobody notices the zippers on the back. We don't feel grown up. We haven't magically acquired wisdom and an understanding of how life works and what the right thing to do is. We haven't suddenly become super competent and self-confident. But we're getting old, we're getting jobs, getting married, having kids. Perhaps we're realizing that most parents were feeling like we're feeling now, a bit overwhelmed, maybe nostalgic for the days of less responsibility and more play, and certainly not qualified to be in charge of the world, like we're kind of having to do.
Most people are doing a fine job of it, but they just don't really feel 'adult,' don't feel like they've arrived. Maybe never feel that way.
I was certainly like that, but as of recently, I have been actually starting to feel adult-ish. I guess, what I imagined being an adult would feel like: a sense of strong stable confidence, a feeling that all the responsibilities that are being expected of me, I am actually moving towards being able to handle, well. A feeling that life is good, that I'm moving in the direction that I want to go, that I'm achieving things, that I'm competent. It's not a feeling of knowing everything, which I'd be alarmed if I felt. that seems too much like hubris, like the bad kind of pride. But it is the feeling that can maybe actually do a pretty good job at life, really truely, not just faking it and getting lucky, or people seeing the outside 5% of what's going on and thinking things are better than they are. So that's cool. Also, I don't think this at all excludes the ability to be playful and childlike in the good ways: full of wonder and present in the now moment.
My alarm just went off. I have two very cute and sweet cats cuddled up next to me on the couch. Setting it for another 15 minutes and wrapping up...
Checking in with my outline... looks like I've already started.
There's a thing at the end of Gottman's main book, the seven principals to make marriage work, called "the magic six hours" about the six hours a week necessary to make a profound positive impact in your relationship, weather it's already good, or on the rocks. one of those ours is "the state of the union" which is a really nicely formatted session where you get to bring up issues that came up during the week. It starts off talking about what went right this week, and then five complements/appreciations that you haven't shared with your partner yet. They you bring up issues and use gottman's suggestions for compromising on conflict/issues and processing hurt feelings "regrettable incidents" as Gottman calls them. In any case, it's super useful on it's own, but I'm kinda taking the title and using it for a different purpose, just a general state of affairs of my life, a retrospective looking back over the last year:
It's been a tremendous growth journey. About a year ago is when I started teaching, and I've grown so much as a teacher, it's quite heartening. I've got a long way more to go before I'm happy with were I am, but I really think I can get there, am on a trajectory to get there.
There has been deep, deep change going on, in so many areas of my life. profound shifts, not just surface changes, but deep changes, in how I think and feel, in how I act, all in really positive ways. What makes it feel so miraculous is these shifts that have happened, are happening, are stuff I've tried to change for years and years and years, and they just haven't shifted. and more recently, they started shifting, and nowadays, they are shifting so fast it's befuddling.
That leads me onto the next point: I feel like I"ve got a really solid tool set. I've researched and practiced and experimented, and I've found teachers and tools that work really really well for me. Again, the difference is profound, having earlier found tools that kind of worked, or worked pretty slowly, or worked sometimes. The difference is hard to describe. It's not just quantitative, but qualitative. a whole new world, as the little mermaid would say.
I've also become someone who is a much better student. more teachable. Even if the technique is not as good, I've become better at listening to my intuition and common sense, I've become better at taking action, not just thinking about stuff passively, but putting theory into practice. I"ve become better at not tripping myself up, tying myself into unnecessary knots with self-hate and unwillingness to try new things because of prejudice, but also not willing to go on wild goose chases following the latest snazzy teacher or book to cross my path, or take everybody's advice but my own. I listen, I put into practice with focus, I filter through my own common sense.
I think it was woody allen who said 80% of success is just showing up. Well, I've gotten pretty good at that, and I can attest to the truth of it. the percentage may be even higher. This may be just because so many people don't take the simple first step of showing up, that those who do have a blinding advantage. I think showing up means showing up, again and again, not just showing up once.
Reflecting back on the year, it feels like I am well on the path towards being good at a job I love, one of my long-term goals, as well as set up for a really wonderful and healthy relationship, and my spirituality has been on track already for the longest time of any of these things. I find this amazing and am bowled over with gratitude, for the teachers and teachings, the mentors, the incredible support I've had from the universe in so many forms. The gratitude is overwhelming, bigger than me, like an ocean rolling over me. And I'm grateful to myself as well. I have done a good job, accepting the bounty offered to me. This richness is not just for me, I'm quite convinced it's available for all of us. It really is a matter of willingness, of teachability, of humility and willingness to take action again and again, to show up, even when it's uncomfortable or discouraging. To not give up, to not get too narrow in how you expect your prayers to be answered.
These two characteristics, are where I give myself the most credit. These are what I think has made me so successful: I'm willing to take good advice. I seek it out, I listen with an open mind, I try, and not just a token try, I give it an honest, full hearted go. And then, weather it works or not, I keep going, I keep trying, if not that specific thing, then continuing to look for solutions. I don't give up.
I'm not a fast learner or do-er, I'm not intense. I don't have extreme willpower, I don't have extreme intelligence. I don't have abundant energy. These things would all be really helpful, but they are not particular strengths of mine. But it's ok, what I had was enough. It probably could have happened a lot faster with those other things, but at least I'm getting there. And so many people don't. Makes me a little sad. I think that's where the inspiration to be a life-coach or teacher of some sort came in, with the sadness that this goodness that I've experienced, is available to most people, without crazy amounts of struggle and pain. Some humility, the willingness to experiment, and persistence towards your dreams. And the willingness to dream at all, I suppose. I set goals for myself that seemed totally outside realistic possibility, and many of them have already been achieved. The mind boggles.
My time is past, my second bit if time is past, my third bit of time is past. I must conclude.
I've never been more excited or optimistic about my life. I'm not reaching a plateau, I'm reaching a new rate of acceleration. the main feeling is just deep gratitude, and humility for how little of it is from me, how much I stand on the shoulders of other people, how much is Grace, God. But also contentment, that I'm doing my part as well, if not ideally, at least sufficiently, and I just seem to get better at doing it, as time goes on, as I keep pushing myself to learn more, improve, grow.
Love and gratitude to all of you. I don't have a special birthday wish for myself, the universe knows my wishes since long ago, all that's left now is doing things for others, sharing, joyful loving service for the sake of love, not to receive something in return. And the continued refinement and improvement of all the things I already have. I feel like I've achieved at least stage one in almost all my main goals, and now it's time for stage two or three, which is about going from basic competency to mastery.
Happy birthday? seems odd to say that to you. In any case, may you find fulfilment in your life.
-Isaac Out
table of contents
zeigarnik effect -game of thrones
I like my new laptop, keyboard, writing experience, battery, newness
birthday - working
acting as if - not new age mumbo jumbo, but scientifically sound methodology specifically for me with regards to being productive, efficient, and well prioritized
state of the union: in gottman, and in my life:
-becoming a true adult, not a kid in a man suite
-profound fundamental change
finding things that work (for me specifically?) (gottman. if-then implementation intentions. cutting ties. Certain teachers.
being someone that works with things (teachable) relationship: check, job, check, spirituality, check. Now, working on quality
I suppose I should do something else that is precedent and proven useful, and set a timer for myself. one hour, starting now.
I keep reaching for my screen, because I've been using my ipad as my computer for the last while. the habit grows on you. It is simpler to click on the exact spot you want, rather than use a track-pad. tablets have laptops beat, in that respect. But tablet keyboards, or at least the ipad one, really are inferior. I think it has to do with the tablet being top heavy because the processing and everything is right behind the screen, but the keyboards for them are ugly, uncomfortable, and weird. They suffice, but they can't beat a good laptop keyboard, and you can get clamshell cases for them, but then you mine as well just get a laptop with a touchscreen. And the main issue continues to be that having an actual fully fledged operating system rather than a phone-like interface allows for so much more functionality, freedom, and flexibility. I think windows has that, but I like apple's OS better and I really like their aesthetic better.
Anyhoo, back to my outline.
I watched the very last episode of Game of Thrones last night. I'll try and avoid spoilers. What I want to talk about isn't the episode itself, which I enjoyed, but the philosophy behind me watching it, when I hadn't wanted a full season since the first one. and not even any intermittent episodes since maybe season 3.
a) I read the books, so I was further than I'd watched, at least, I think the books go up to at least season 5, maybe further.
b) I kind of dislike the author of the books, for making me wait so unreasonably long between books, and for going off on boring tangents so frequently. I feel like he kind of hates me too, in a general, hates all his readers sense. I mean, it seem like he wants to cause his readers pain, even within the story, tormenting the characters you like, making awful things happen to them, but it also just seems like he doesn't care about how much we want to find out what happens. He's off dicking around, writing at a snails pace, writing other side stories. I think he's even said he's kind of tired of writing the books. So he's lost any good will he earned from me for the first three books. As it stands I just wanted to find out what happens to the characters he made me care so much about, and learn the answers to all the questions and mysteries he's tempted us with.
I've often done this with series that I don't really like. I have an unreasonably strong attachment to finishing stories that grab me, bordering on addiction or compulsion, and though I can usually tame it for any short length of time needed to function as a normal human being, it will always resurface when I get some free time, urging me to find out what happens. This is why I end up with anger for various series, that seem to never end, or end poorly. I crave that conclusion.
A psychologist named this need to "close the loop" on things, the Zeigarnik effect (after themselves, I assume?) and it wasn't originally focused on story-telling, but tv and films often use it as a wickedly effective weapon, to keep us watching even though the show isn't that good. They keep ending on cliff-hangers, urging us to watch just one more episode, and then one more. If you have any unfinished task though, it ends up like this: a record skipping, repeating the same thing over and over, taking up your mental processing power, no matter how trivial. It's a useful tool if you use it for good, but also a great source of distraction in many cases.
So when I had the opportunity to finally close the loop on that long series, that I didn't even want to watch fully anyways, since it was so dark and negative and I try to keep my sensory and mental inputs healthy like I do with my food inputs, I took it. Also helped that I was just getting in on a group watching session that my girlfriend had been going to and it meant I got to cuddle for an hour and a half with her, after a long day's work (oh yes, I work on sundays. And Saturdays. Less than the weekdays, but still. That's my life. I got the morning off work for my birthday, and I'm just going to spend it doing more work, and be grateful for the opportunity.)
OK, how much time to I have left? how many topics? 33 minutes, 2 out of about 10. Yeps, that seems about right for me.
Oh, I guess I already kind of talked about this next one: I got a new (old) laptop. I'm doing so much traveling with my laptop, it really makes a difference, having something lighter, and with a better battery (my computer itself has told me, a while ago, that I really need to change the battery. I think I get less than an hour of time away from an outlet, if I'm doing anything using internet and processing power.)
I really like my strategy, of buying a laptop that's just a year or two old. The price goes down real quick those first few years, more than is warranted by the small drop in performance or the incremental upgrades happening year by year. Even better if it's a little cosmetically damaged. The first little ding saves you around 50 bucks. It seems like your paying closer to the actual price it's worth, rather than the added price you pay for newness.
In any case, the keyboard has a really satisfying click, and the sturdiness of it is a great relief after using my ipad for so long. Also, it so much lighter than my old laptop, it's much easier to pick it up in one hand and take it into the living room to type, where there's better like, (though also means I accessible to a cat that is sometimes kind of naughty in an attempt to get my attention. feels a bit like being a teacher. I'm amused by this, but not by the cat using the couch as a scratching post.
And the battery is normal, meaning I don't need to worry about running out halfway through what I'm doing. Very pleased. I guess this is my birthday present to myself. Next topic...
Ah, also already covered the fact that my birthday will be mostly working. morning off, work. afternoon, normal work. get home from school... I don't know what my girlfriend will want to do, she's got a big event that day, so I may just work more. At some point, I like to take time to reflect back on my year, enjoy my successes, and reflect on how I want to grow and what my goals are for the coming year. And I get up before the sunrise and go for a walk, with the intention of being open to the universe to give me a pertinent message for the coming year.
next...
I've been thinking about an idea I've heard from a number of different sources: "act as if... whatever you wanted to be true (especially about yourself) was already true." It sounds a bit new-agey, but it has some clear roots in cognitive and behavioral psychology. The current science seems to indicate that we have something like a little guy (gal) in our heads that see's what we're doing, and tries to make a coherent story out of it. That is, we do things, and then later we give those things reasons. In the same way, our stories about ourselves are not just self-fulfilling prophecies, they are created by our actions. The original thought was that we need to feel a certain way to act a certain way, but the actual research shows that we can actually just act a certain way, and we will then start to feel that way. almost like a justification for the actions. So the idea of acting "as if" you were, say, a confident businesswoman, is not just a "believe in it strong enough and it will be true" new-age self-help platitude. It's actually a totally valid way of changing self-perception. And obviously, it changes your actions.
Some people (me included) are hesitant to try acting a different way, "because that's being phoney." or "because that's just not who I am yet." and they are waiting until they feel like they are that kind of person, but that's just not very effective. We see what we do, and that shapes how we feel, so sometimes we just have to use our imagination to pretend we already are that kind of person. Not to try and lie to ourselves, that the imagination is real, but so we can figure out what we would be doing, if we were that kind of person, so we can do that action, now. Because doing the actions that imaginary super-us would do, is often the best way to change our view and feelings about ourselves, which then makes doing those actions easier and more natural. I could talk about the imposter syndrome, and how the highest achievers, like students accepted into Stanford, are the most susceptible to it, but I'll have to save that for another time.
This seems like a good segway into being a kid in an adult suit.
I think a lot of us "adults" feel like we kind a stopped aging mentally and are now just wearing these weird big person suits, hoping nobody notices the zippers on the back. We don't feel grown up. We haven't magically acquired wisdom and an understanding of how life works and what the right thing to do is. We haven't suddenly become super competent and self-confident. But we're getting old, we're getting jobs, getting married, having kids. Perhaps we're realizing that most parents were feeling like we're feeling now, a bit overwhelmed, maybe nostalgic for the days of less responsibility and more play, and certainly not qualified to be in charge of the world, like we're kind of having to do.
Most people are doing a fine job of it, but they just don't really feel 'adult,' don't feel like they've arrived. Maybe never feel that way.
I was certainly like that, but as of recently, I have been actually starting to feel adult-ish. I guess, what I imagined being an adult would feel like: a sense of strong stable confidence, a feeling that all the responsibilities that are being expected of me, I am actually moving towards being able to handle, well. A feeling that life is good, that I'm moving in the direction that I want to go, that I'm achieving things, that I'm competent. It's not a feeling of knowing everything, which I'd be alarmed if I felt. that seems too much like hubris, like the bad kind of pride. But it is the feeling that can maybe actually do a pretty good job at life, really truely, not just faking it and getting lucky, or people seeing the outside 5% of what's going on and thinking things are better than they are. So that's cool. Also, I don't think this at all excludes the ability to be playful and childlike in the good ways: full of wonder and present in the now moment.
My alarm just went off. I have two very cute and sweet cats cuddled up next to me on the couch. Setting it for another 15 minutes and wrapping up...
Checking in with my outline... looks like I've already started.
There's a thing at the end of Gottman's main book, the seven principals to make marriage work, called "the magic six hours" about the six hours a week necessary to make a profound positive impact in your relationship, weather it's already good, or on the rocks. one of those ours is "the state of the union" which is a really nicely formatted session where you get to bring up issues that came up during the week. It starts off talking about what went right this week, and then five complements/appreciations that you haven't shared with your partner yet. They you bring up issues and use gottman's suggestions for compromising on conflict/issues and processing hurt feelings "regrettable incidents" as Gottman calls them. In any case, it's super useful on it's own, but I'm kinda taking the title and using it for a different purpose, just a general state of affairs of my life, a retrospective looking back over the last year:
It's been a tremendous growth journey. About a year ago is when I started teaching, and I've grown so much as a teacher, it's quite heartening. I've got a long way more to go before I'm happy with were I am, but I really think I can get there, am on a trajectory to get there.
There has been deep, deep change going on, in so many areas of my life. profound shifts, not just surface changes, but deep changes, in how I think and feel, in how I act, all in really positive ways. What makes it feel so miraculous is these shifts that have happened, are happening, are stuff I've tried to change for years and years and years, and they just haven't shifted. and more recently, they started shifting, and nowadays, they are shifting so fast it's befuddling.
That leads me onto the next point: I feel like I"ve got a really solid tool set. I've researched and practiced and experimented, and I've found teachers and tools that work really really well for me. Again, the difference is profound, having earlier found tools that kind of worked, or worked pretty slowly, or worked sometimes. The difference is hard to describe. It's not just quantitative, but qualitative. a whole new world, as the little mermaid would say.
I've also become someone who is a much better student. more teachable. Even if the technique is not as good, I've become better at listening to my intuition and common sense, I've become better at taking action, not just thinking about stuff passively, but putting theory into practice. I"ve become better at not tripping myself up, tying myself into unnecessary knots with self-hate and unwillingness to try new things because of prejudice, but also not willing to go on wild goose chases following the latest snazzy teacher or book to cross my path, or take everybody's advice but my own. I listen, I put into practice with focus, I filter through my own common sense.
I think it was woody allen who said 80% of success is just showing up. Well, I've gotten pretty good at that, and I can attest to the truth of it. the percentage may be even higher. This may be just because so many people don't take the simple first step of showing up, that those who do have a blinding advantage. I think showing up means showing up, again and again, not just showing up once.
Reflecting back on the year, it feels like I am well on the path towards being good at a job I love, one of my long-term goals, as well as set up for a really wonderful and healthy relationship, and my spirituality has been on track already for the longest time of any of these things. I find this amazing and am bowled over with gratitude, for the teachers and teachings, the mentors, the incredible support I've had from the universe in so many forms. The gratitude is overwhelming, bigger than me, like an ocean rolling over me. And I'm grateful to myself as well. I have done a good job, accepting the bounty offered to me. This richness is not just for me, I'm quite convinced it's available for all of us. It really is a matter of willingness, of teachability, of humility and willingness to take action again and again, to show up, even when it's uncomfortable or discouraging. To not give up, to not get too narrow in how you expect your prayers to be answered.
These two characteristics, are where I give myself the most credit. These are what I think has made me so successful: I'm willing to take good advice. I seek it out, I listen with an open mind, I try, and not just a token try, I give it an honest, full hearted go. And then, weather it works or not, I keep going, I keep trying, if not that specific thing, then continuing to look for solutions. I don't give up.
I'm not a fast learner or do-er, I'm not intense. I don't have extreme willpower, I don't have extreme intelligence. I don't have abundant energy. These things would all be really helpful, but they are not particular strengths of mine. But it's ok, what I had was enough. It probably could have happened a lot faster with those other things, but at least I'm getting there. And so many people don't. Makes me a little sad. I think that's where the inspiration to be a life-coach or teacher of some sort came in, with the sadness that this goodness that I've experienced, is available to most people, without crazy amounts of struggle and pain. Some humility, the willingness to experiment, and persistence towards your dreams. And the willingness to dream at all, I suppose. I set goals for myself that seemed totally outside realistic possibility, and many of them have already been achieved. The mind boggles.
My time is past, my second bit if time is past, my third bit of time is past. I must conclude.
I've never been more excited or optimistic about my life. I'm not reaching a plateau, I'm reaching a new rate of acceleration. the main feeling is just deep gratitude, and humility for how little of it is from me, how much I stand on the shoulders of other people, how much is Grace, God. But also contentment, that I'm doing my part as well, if not ideally, at least sufficiently, and I just seem to get better at doing it, as time goes on, as I keep pushing myself to learn more, improve, grow.
Love and gratitude to all of you. I don't have a special birthday wish for myself, the universe knows my wishes since long ago, all that's left now is doing things for others, sharing, joyful loving service for the sake of love, not to receive something in return. And the continued refinement and improvement of all the things I already have. I feel like I've achieved at least stage one in almost all my main goals, and now it's time for stage two or three, which is about going from basic competency to mastery.
Happy birthday? seems odd to say that to you. In any case, may you find fulfilment in your life.
-Isaac Out
Sunday, May 12, 2019
Symbiosis and Parasites. Time is wealth. Timing myself. Being milked resentfully. Plug for someone else’s program.
I have set the timer on my watch for 30 minutes. That’s all I’m giving myself. It is conceivable that I will be forced to stop mid thought, so if the end of this seems abrupt, it’s because I’m forcing myself to obey a time-frame, because I have so dang much stuff to do.
I have a dream board to finish for the Power in Your Minds Practicum which I’m doing, a follow up course to the Power in Your Minds course. It’s pretty hard to explain, I wonder if I can just link you to a video, if your actually interested. Hey, I think there’s even a referral link, I’ll get some money off something if you decide to do it, and you... do something... I don’t know how it works. And I’m not sure I want to spend the time to find out. Well, let’s see if I can do it easily... ah, yes, it’s easy, you just have to let me know that your doing the power in your mind course, and I can effectively dibs you, saying, “I referred that person”
But what about a link you could look at... aha, also easy: here is something they suggest referring people to if they think they might be interested. It’s called, “Become a super manifester”
https://sai-maa.lpages.co/piym-become-a-super-manifester/
It’s all about making your goals and dreams into reality. I’ve found it to be pretty powerful, so I’m willing to give them a little free advertisement. Their hearts and minds are in the right place.
Twenty minutes left.
The reason I thought about timing myself was because I had originally mentioned it to my girlfriend, who then, some time early on today, asked if I was going to do my blog today, and if I was going to use the method I’d mentioned to her, to keep from going over time. I certainly had forgotten, but since she reminded me about it, I’m doing it now.
This makes me think of virtuous cycles and symbiosis. I feel like we have a nicely symbiotic relationship. We support each other, we’re both better together. She makes me stronger in various areas of my life, and I make her stronger in various areas. It feels really good. This is as opposed to the... parasitic? Way that relationships sometimes feel. I’m not sure if it’s parasitic, usually that means one party is getting their needs met, but I feel like neither of us was getting our needs met, in previous relationships... Though often, it is one party that ends up breaking up with the other, perhaps that’s how you tell who’s getting something from the relationship and who’s not...
Calling it parasitic is pretty unflattering though. Maybe mutually parasitic is equally unflattering to both parties, and so less offensive. In any case, this relationship feels distinctly symbiotic, not parasitic. I suppose you could think of that as loving the other person in a way that wants to support and sacrifice for them, that wants them to flourish, vs. being solely concerned with getting your own needs met. The perhaps more common form of “love”. Love being a euphemism in this case, like it often is in phrases like “let’s make love”. Which often have little if anything to do with love. What that actually means is “let’s make sex”.
Eleven minutes, forty-five seconds. Less, now, since I just did some spell checking. I need to do that as I go, because I’m writing this on my iPad Pro. It’s really nice in many ways, but iOS is still a pain in the neck compared to OSX. The web browser isn’t as good, the file management isn’t as good. There are lots of little buggy problems that pop up, when your trying to do actual content management and creation, where you don’t want something super simple and vanilla. I’m sure Mac likes it because they can control the app ecosystem much more securely, which means they get a piece of the money whenever anybody buys anything, but that’s one of those examples of good for the company, but not good for the customer, and so when they lean on that, they are abusing their customers, who are slowly losing the good-will they generated by other means. If you want to be a good company long-term, you have to be actually desiring to serve your customers, rather than just trying to milk them for all you can get. Generate value, be of service, and over time, word will get around. Be devious little parasites, trying to siphon off as much blood as they can without being noticed and shaken off, and eventually people will leave.... ah crap, here we go, right now, with every word I type, blogger wigs out and and switches screens. Fuuuuu!
Well, I’m almost out of time anyways...
I have a dream board to finish for the Power in Your Minds Practicum which I’m doing, a follow up course to the Power in Your Minds course. It’s pretty hard to explain, I wonder if I can just link you to a video, if your actually interested. Hey, I think there’s even a referral link, I’ll get some money off something if you decide to do it, and you... do something... I don’t know how it works. And I’m not sure I want to spend the time to find out. Well, let’s see if I can do it easily... ah, yes, it’s easy, you just have to let me know that your doing the power in your mind course, and I can effectively dibs you, saying, “I referred that person”
But what about a link you could look at... aha, also easy: here is something they suggest referring people to if they think they might be interested. It’s called, “Become a super manifester”
https://sai-maa.lpages.co/piym-become-a-super-manifester/
It’s all about making your goals and dreams into reality. I’ve found it to be pretty powerful, so I’m willing to give them a little free advertisement. Their hearts and minds are in the right place.
Twenty minutes left.
The reason I thought about timing myself was because I had originally mentioned it to my girlfriend, who then, some time early on today, asked if I was going to do my blog today, and if I was going to use the method I’d mentioned to her, to keep from going over time. I certainly had forgotten, but since she reminded me about it, I’m doing it now.
This makes me think of virtuous cycles and symbiosis. I feel like we have a nicely symbiotic relationship. We support each other, we’re both better together. She makes me stronger in various areas of my life, and I make her stronger in various areas. It feels really good. This is as opposed to the... parasitic? Way that relationships sometimes feel. I’m not sure if it’s parasitic, usually that means one party is getting their needs met, but I feel like neither of us was getting our needs met, in previous relationships... Though often, it is one party that ends up breaking up with the other, perhaps that’s how you tell who’s getting something from the relationship and who’s not...
Calling it parasitic is pretty unflattering though. Maybe mutually parasitic is equally unflattering to both parties, and so less offensive. In any case, this relationship feels distinctly symbiotic, not parasitic. I suppose you could think of that as loving the other person in a way that wants to support and sacrifice for them, that wants them to flourish, vs. being solely concerned with getting your own needs met. The perhaps more common form of “love”. Love being a euphemism in this case, like it often is in phrases like “let’s make love”. Which often have little if anything to do with love. What that actually means is “let’s make sex”.
Eleven minutes, forty-five seconds. Less, now, since I just did some spell checking. I need to do that as I go, because I’m writing this on my iPad Pro. It’s really nice in many ways, but iOS is still a pain in the neck compared to OSX. The web browser isn’t as good, the file management isn’t as good. There are lots of little buggy problems that pop up, when your trying to do actual content management and creation, where you don’t want something super simple and vanilla. I’m sure Mac likes it because they can control the app ecosystem much more securely, which means they get a piece of the money whenever anybody buys anything, but that’s one of those examples of good for the company, but not good for the customer, and so when they lean on that, they are abusing their customers, who are slowly losing the good-will they generated by other means. If you want to be a good company long-term, you have to be actually desiring to serve your customers, rather than just trying to milk them for all you can get. Generate value, be of service, and over time, word will get around. Be devious little parasites, trying to siphon off as much blood as they can without being noticed and shaken off, and eventually people will leave.... ah crap, here we go, right now, with every word I type, blogger wigs out and and switches screens. Fuuuuu!
Well, I’m almost out of time anyways...
Ok, now I’m using an app, I need a separate app, just to type out my blog post. An app which costs five bucks, if I want to actually be able to publish from it. So I’ll just copy past, for now, until I’ve used it for a bit and decided it’s worth it. This is what I’m talking about, iOS sometimes feels like a milking machine, and we are the cows, and our milk is our money.
Anyhoo, only a few... whoop. A few seconds left. Well, I wanted to say something about Mother’s Day, so, happy Mother’s Day, mothers! It’s good that you are acknowledged for your great service of love and sacrifice that is at the foundation of how our future looks, via how our children are raised. And you build them inside your bodies, which is pretty cool and unfortunately uncomfortable, it seems.
Well, I’m past my time, I need to wrap up. I gave myself an extra five minutes, but if I can do it sooner than that, it’s better. I’m thinking of exchanging my mammoth laptop for a smaller one, so I don’t have these iOS issues, since then I’ll be able to carry around my laptop instead of my iPad, when necessary.
I’m unbelievably busy. I keep wondering how the heck everything’s going to get done, and more things just keep getting piled on. Time is truly the greatest wealth. As is,... nope, that’s it. The second five minute alarm went off. Stopping me from going off on another tangent. Seems like this strategy was an effective one. Making a note in my imaginary scientific journal.
Have a good week, give your mom a hug, see ya next time, hopefully with a lot more done, but let’s be realistic, it’s almost certainly going to continue being just the bare minimum necessary to not be late on essential things, day by day.
^_^
Bye!
Wednesday, May 8, 2019
Looooong (post)cat, Rip your nightmares apart. Trolls, the Joker, a cheat code for life that almost no one uses
It’s Tuesday. This should say something about the level of busy that I currently am at. I have a long blog post I wrote on the plane ride back from Austin, a week and a bit ago. It’s very long, and I still need to edit it. I’ll see if I can do that for this week, though it will be a little dated.
I think the limerence phase of love is partly the attractiveness of new things. New anything is exciting. But that by definition can’t last forever. That’s one of the reasons it’s a poor time to make related long-term decisions. What you will have to live with is what’s there after the limerence wearers off, in a few weeks or months, possibly a year or two? I’m trying to remember what the studies said about the outside ballpark length of limerence. Just did a google of it, and it seems like it can last quite a while, but usually that’s when it’s neither clearly rejected nor clearly accepted. And it sounds kind of unhealthy, being often related to love addiction and affairs, at least from google searches.
In any case, just to say, their is a really wonderful friendship there, which is what makes me enthusiastic about the longevity of this relationship. Even when the limerence is gone (though I’m not even sure this is limerence, given how intense it sounds on the internet) there will still be some deeply compelling reasons to stay in the relationship. What I wanted was a partner who felt like one of my very best friends, and that’s what it feels like, so far. Amazing.
OK, now it’s Wednesday. That’s how busy things are.
Attempting to edit blog post quickly...
Here it is. Took me about twice as long because of technical difficulties. I’m writing a lot from my iPad, and no matter what they try and do, it really is a deeply inferior experience from a full fledged laptop. It’s just so much less flexible. The web browser doesn’t work as well... it’s just second best in a lot of ways. Really, the only thing it’s better at is drawing stuff. Anyhoo. Here we go.
Blog post April 27th 2019
Well, I actually have a bit of time today. Though I don’t know if that will make it longer. There are always other things to do, once my blog is done, so I don’t want to spend too long on it.
I vaguely recall there being a lot of things that have happened, and that I want to talk about, but mostly I think they’ve been forgotten.
I had a cool dream. I only remember it because my girlfriend mentioned to me that same morning that she’d had a weird dream, kinda nightmarish. It reminds me how I used to almost constantly have nightmares, really intense ones that would wake me up, soaked in sweat, profoundly grateful to have awoken from it and afraid to go back to sleep. But nowadays, though I still have some pretty creepy dreams, they are more adventure stories.
For example, this last one, though I don’t remember all the details now, I know it was a bit creepy, I was being a sneaky hero, saving people, I think I had a phasing power, kind of like shadow cat from the x-men, or vision from the Avengers. Anyways, I ended up facing this creepy end-boss type thing that was in charge of things and I had been avoiding them, because I couldn’t just kill it, and it was chasing me and the people I was trying to protect/rescue.
It felt very much like one of those monster dreams, where you’re being chased and can never seem to really get a way permanently. But I didn’t run. I turned and faced it, and started fighting it. At first it was invincible, like so many boogeymen are, but I just kind of... exerted my will against it, kept pushing it back, trying to rip it apart, and slowly gained ground until I had fully ripped it apart, killing it. And then we were safe and the tone of the dream changed to a positive feeling. A nice dream. It felt quite triumphant.
The metaphor is obvious here: facing your fear, not giving in or running away, and simply using strength of mind to overcome the negative forces, like fear, that are haunting you. While it’s true that what you resist, persists, there is another way of fighting with your mind, where you do not resist or fight it exactly, you just kind of stand firm and hold to your reality, focusing on something inspiring and strengthening, a positive mental action. It takes finesse, it takes practice, but it is possible, obviously, since I do it often, including in dreams.
You’ve heard the old trope: “don’t think of a pink elephant.” And then the person talks about how it’s nearly impossible to successfully not think of it, when your trying to not think of it. That’s like “try not to be afraid of the monster” or “try not to be afraid of all the responsibility you have, as a new teacher.” You need something positive to think of, and you need to not worry about that other thought coming up. So, for example, with the pink elephant, if your trying not to think of it, for some reason, a more successful strategy might be:
“It’s totally fine if you happen to think of a pink elephant, just neutrally accept the thought and don’t worry about it, but focus on a purple ant-eater, and if your mind happens to go to something else, once you realize it’s wandered, just return it back to the purple ant eater.”
For the teaching thing, it might be, “if you feel afraid or worried, that’s fine, just neutrally accept the feelings as ok, and then imagine surrendering the results of your actions to a higher power, imagining them taking over responsibility for the results of your actions, then just pay attention to your inner guidance and follow that, knowing that’s the best you can do, and that’s enough.” ... a little more complicated, perhaps, but I wanted a real example, rather than “...just focus on an image of you, a year from now, feeling confident and relaxed while you’re teaching.” Since I don’t know how well that would actually work.
But you could probably try focusing on how all the challenges your facing and mistakes you might make are just stepping stones to becoming a great teacher, all you have to do is add some self-reflection about what went wrong and how you could make it go right, in the future. Growth mindset stuff (which is so important for everybody. I feel like people should be teaching and taking classes in growth mindset. Few tools are more useful for happiness, reduced anxiety, and achievement.)
Woo, just heard the announcement that we’re landing (I’m typing this on the plane.) and glanced over what I’ve written, and it’s already super long.
I guess I’ll just bullet point the other things I want to mention
-the relationship continues to be amazing. When a relationship is really positive and nurturing, it is amazing how good it feels. This is not limerence stuff, this is a deep sense of well-being that is clearly having positive impacts on my general mood, resistance to stress, and physical health and energy levels. I think Gottman was the one that pointed out that having a nourishing, positive committed relationship was better for your health and longevity than exercising every day. So if people who were gym rat’s would just spend half the time they put into working out, into working on their relationship, they’d get significantly more health benefits.
This makes me think of another thing Gottman said, that’s stuck in my mind: relationships are entropic systems. Meaning, like the earths ecosystems, they need constant energy input from outside, or they will tend to loose energy, wind down, and eventually stop. The sun provides that for the earths systems, for the most part. But often people seem to think that relationships will just grow on their own, without any additional work or maintenance work. And that’s crazy. That’s why so many relationships dwindle. They don’t have to dwindle, they can just get deeper and richer, though the limerence stuff will absolutely die down.
One anonymous reader posted a comment (which I didn’t approve. All comments have to get approved by me before showing up, and additionally, bloggers platform is borked and often I don’t even get comments that people try and post, I find out about it later, because my family member talks about the comment they made and I look and it’s not there at all. I may switch platforms some day. Wordpress maybe.) anyhoo, a comment saying, “people were having good marriages before Gottman came along.” Which, along with some other stuff and the kind of patronizing tone, at first just ticked me off. It sounded like, “stop being a Gottman fanboy, listen to my advice instead. You are too dumb to realize that people got married and sometimes it worked, before Gottman came along. you’re listening to him too much.”
My first, immediate response was something like, “Fuuuuuuu!” My second response was, “what the hey, why is this anonymous person deciding to tell me my favorite source of relationship advice is dumb. It’s times like these that the difference in actual tea and digital tea becomes clear: first off, there is no anonymous tea in real life, so I know who I’m talking to, and that alone tends to make certain people about 10 times more polite and gentle in their speech. Anonymity is the cesspool from which trolls are born. (Or perhaps transformed, when certain otherwise normal people fall in. Like the Joker’s origin story where he falls into the vat of chemicals.) Second, if someone is rude in person I can just say, “if you are going to be like that, you’re not invited to tea.” And they will either stop giving abrasive unsolicited advice or stop coming to tea (or I’ll stop inviting them.)
(I should add that this is just one person, among the vast majority of very enjoyable comments (some of which are even advice-y, which is fine, as long as it’s not abrasive) I get from you. If you’re worried it’s you, just imagine if I knew who it was posting the comments. If you’d be fine sending the message as an email to me, it probably isn’t you, and your comment is fine. And you might want to send it as an email or facebook message anyways, since I apparently don’t get half the comments that people submit.)
Anyhoo, by final response, after I’d cooled down, was, “that poor person. They’ve just dismissed out of hand the best bet they have for taking their relationship to the next level, wherever it currently is, and avoiding the most negative of what relationships have to offer.”
It kind of astounds me, how the great majority of people ignore even the most mainstream, well proven good advice. It’s not hard to do a little research, and improve your relationship, your sex-life, your habits, your... just about anything.
It almost feels like a cheat code for life, doing this, because so few other people are doing it, but it’s not exclusive. You all have the ability to do this.
Though I suppose I can relate. It took me a while to track down good advice, and sort it from the bad. It took awhile to get the advice that would help me apply the other advice (the stuff on motivation, habit change, etc.) and it does take time, learning those “how to apply” skills isn’t instant. I guess it’s a mixture of all the emotional baggage we carry with us, and the difficulty in information overload without a good way to sort it, and all the things in life that distract us almost constantly, that makes it super hard to just sit down with a book or something, read for an hour or two, and commit to adding the one most useful 2 minute habit you can think of, to practice every day.
I’d create something that does that for people, cutting out all the excess research time, distilling advice and vetting sources, and make a lot of money, but I’m certain it already exists, so really I just need to do some curating (which is way easier and less lucrative.) Though I haven’t found anybody who explicitly said they were teaching the skills so you could learn all the other skills. Those skills are pretty specific. From understanding how habit change works, (and doesn’t work) to understanding and dealing with the things that get in the way of doing the most important and useful things, to dealing with setbacks. To maximizing willpower and good choices.
In any case, the active unwillingness to learn often leaves me scratching my head. I can understand feeling like you don’t have the time, but there are a lot of people who wouldn’t do it, even if they did have the time. It’s like...they resent being given advice... hmmm, is this turning back on me? Perhaps it’s the same feeling as the anonymous person: unsolicited advice, even if it’s high quality, can be so abrasivly delivered that it’s almost impossible to listen to it. It’s like, the advice has been laced with the idea that I as a person am inferior, so for me to choose to swallow the advice, I also have to swallow the unstated assertion that I am fundamentally bad, or low or something.
Perhaps that’s what’s going on with other people, all the time, when they hear good advice and don’t follow it? I think it’s more complicated than that, but it makes me think of the debunkers handbook, a short treatise written by climate change scientists, to try and help people who believe in science talk to people who are being super dumb about what they believe (like that climate change is a myth... I wonder if I’m gonna get people angry from saying that... I don’t know who would read my blog who’d be offended by that though...) They collected the scientific research about how people change there minds about things, and it turns out that actually changing people’s beliefs systems is deeply illogical. It’s almost all about emotion. You need a believable alternative story, but it being super scientific is not really gonna help much. That’s why so many people believe things that are so deeply illogical and unscientific: people who have little interest in truth are using the same techniques, to convince them of other things. And they’re better at it, because they’re more used to doing things that way, because they don’t have the science on their side.
I think the limerence phase of love is partly the attractiveness of new things. New anything is exciting. But that by definition can’t last forever. That’s one of the reasons it’s a poor time to make related long-term decisions. What you will have to live with is what’s there after the limerence wearers off, in a few weeks or months, possibly a year or two? I’m trying to remember what the studies said about the outside ballpark length of limerence. Just did a google of it, and it seems like it can last quite a while, but usually that’s when it’s neither clearly rejected nor clearly accepted. And it sounds kind of unhealthy, being often related to love addiction and affairs, at least from google searches.
In any case, just to say, their is a really wonderful friendship there, which is what makes me enthusiastic about the longevity of this relationship. Even when the limerence is gone (though I’m not even sure this is limerence, given how intense it sounds on the internet) there will still be some deeply compelling reasons to stay in the relationship. What I wanted was a partner who felt like one of my very best friends, and that’s what it feels like, so far. Amazing.
OK, now it’s Wednesday. That’s how busy things are.
Attempting to edit blog post quickly...
Here it is. Took me about twice as long because of technical difficulties. I’m writing a lot from my iPad, and no matter what they try and do, it really is a deeply inferior experience from a full fledged laptop. It’s just so much less flexible. The web browser doesn’t work as well... it’s just second best in a lot of ways. Really, the only thing it’s better at is drawing stuff. Anyhoo. Here we go.
Blog post April 27th 2019
Well, I actually have a bit of time today. Though I don’t know if that will make it longer. There are always other things to do, once my blog is done, so I don’t want to spend too long on it.
I vaguely recall there being a lot of things that have happened, and that I want to talk about, but mostly I think they’ve been forgotten.
I had a cool dream. I only remember it because my girlfriend mentioned to me that same morning that she’d had a weird dream, kinda nightmarish. It reminds me how I used to almost constantly have nightmares, really intense ones that would wake me up, soaked in sweat, profoundly grateful to have awoken from it and afraid to go back to sleep. But nowadays, though I still have some pretty creepy dreams, they are more adventure stories.
For example, this last one, though I don’t remember all the details now, I know it was a bit creepy, I was being a sneaky hero, saving people, I think I had a phasing power, kind of like shadow cat from the x-men, or vision from the Avengers. Anyways, I ended up facing this creepy end-boss type thing that was in charge of things and I had been avoiding them, because I couldn’t just kill it, and it was chasing me and the people I was trying to protect/rescue.
It felt very much like one of those monster dreams, where you’re being chased and can never seem to really get a way permanently. But I didn’t run. I turned and faced it, and started fighting it. At first it was invincible, like so many boogeymen are, but I just kind of... exerted my will against it, kept pushing it back, trying to rip it apart, and slowly gained ground until I had fully ripped it apart, killing it. And then we were safe and the tone of the dream changed to a positive feeling. A nice dream. It felt quite triumphant.
The metaphor is obvious here: facing your fear, not giving in or running away, and simply using strength of mind to overcome the negative forces, like fear, that are haunting you. While it’s true that what you resist, persists, there is another way of fighting with your mind, where you do not resist or fight it exactly, you just kind of stand firm and hold to your reality, focusing on something inspiring and strengthening, a positive mental action. It takes finesse, it takes practice, but it is possible, obviously, since I do it often, including in dreams.
You’ve heard the old trope: “don’t think of a pink elephant.” And then the person talks about how it’s nearly impossible to successfully not think of it, when your trying to not think of it. That’s like “try not to be afraid of the monster” or “try not to be afraid of all the responsibility you have, as a new teacher.” You need something positive to think of, and you need to not worry about that other thought coming up. So, for example, with the pink elephant, if your trying not to think of it, for some reason, a more successful strategy might be:
“It’s totally fine if you happen to think of a pink elephant, just neutrally accept the thought and don’t worry about it, but focus on a purple ant-eater, and if your mind happens to go to something else, once you realize it’s wandered, just return it back to the purple ant eater.”
For the teaching thing, it might be, “if you feel afraid or worried, that’s fine, just neutrally accept the feelings as ok, and then imagine surrendering the results of your actions to a higher power, imagining them taking over responsibility for the results of your actions, then just pay attention to your inner guidance and follow that, knowing that’s the best you can do, and that’s enough.” ... a little more complicated, perhaps, but I wanted a real example, rather than “...just focus on an image of you, a year from now, feeling confident and relaxed while you’re teaching.” Since I don’t know how well that would actually work.
But you could probably try focusing on how all the challenges your facing and mistakes you might make are just stepping stones to becoming a great teacher, all you have to do is add some self-reflection about what went wrong and how you could make it go right, in the future. Growth mindset stuff (which is so important for everybody. I feel like people should be teaching and taking classes in growth mindset. Few tools are more useful for happiness, reduced anxiety, and achievement.)
Woo, just heard the announcement that we’re landing (I’m typing this on the plane.) and glanced over what I’ve written, and it’s already super long.
I guess I’ll just bullet point the other things I want to mention
-the relationship continues to be amazing. When a relationship is really positive and nurturing, it is amazing how good it feels. This is not limerence stuff, this is a deep sense of well-being that is clearly having positive impacts on my general mood, resistance to stress, and physical health and energy levels. I think Gottman was the one that pointed out that having a nourishing, positive committed relationship was better for your health and longevity than exercising every day. So if people who were gym rat’s would just spend half the time they put into working out, into working on their relationship, they’d get significantly more health benefits.
This makes me think of another thing Gottman said, that’s stuck in my mind: relationships are entropic systems. Meaning, like the earths ecosystems, they need constant energy input from outside, or they will tend to loose energy, wind down, and eventually stop. The sun provides that for the earths systems, for the most part. But often people seem to think that relationships will just grow on their own, without any additional work or maintenance work. And that’s crazy. That’s why so many relationships dwindle. They don’t have to dwindle, they can just get deeper and richer, though the limerence stuff will absolutely die down.
One anonymous reader posted a comment (which I didn’t approve. All comments have to get approved by me before showing up, and additionally, bloggers platform is borked and often I don’t even get comments that people try and post, I find out about it later, because my family member talks about the comment they made and I look and it’s not there at all. I may switch platforms some day. Wordpress maybe.) anyhoo, a comment saying, “people were having good marriages before Gottman came along.” Which, along with some other stuff and the kind of patronizing tone, at first just ticked me off. It sounded like, “stop being a Gottman fanboy, listen to my advice instead. You are too dumb to realize that people got married and sometimes it worked, before Gottman came along. you’re listening to him too much.”
My first, immediate response was something like, “Fuuuuuuu!” My second response was, “what the hey, why is this anonymous person deciding to tell me my favorite source of relationship advice is dumb. It’s times like these that the difference in actual tea and digital tea becomes clear: first off, there is no anonymous tea in real life, so I know who I’m talking to, and that alone tends to make certain people about 10 times more polite and gentle in their speech. Anonymity is the cesspool from which trolls are born. (Or perhaps transformed, when certain otherwise normal people fall in. Like the Joker’s origin story where he falls into the vat of chemicals.) Second, if someone is rude in person I can just say, “if you are going to be like that, you’re not invited to tea.” And they will either stop giving abrasive unsolicited advice or stop coming to tea (or I’ll stop inviting them.)
(I should add that this is just one person, among the vast majority of very enjoyable comments (some of which are even advice-y, which is fine, as long as it’s not abrasive) I get from you. If you’re worried it’s you, just imagine if I knew who it was posting the comments. If you’d be fine sending the message as an email to me, it probably isn’t you, and your comment is fine. And you might want to send it as an email or facebook message anyways, since I apparently don’t get half the comments that people submit.)
Anyhoo, by final response, after I’d cooled down, was, “that poor person. They’ve just dismissed out of hand the best bet they have for taking their relationship to the next level, wherever it currently is, and avoiding the most negative of what relationships have to offer.”
It kind of astounds me, how the great majority of people ignore even the most mainstream, well proven good advice. It’s not hard to do a little research, and improve your relationship, your sex-life, your habits, your... just about anything.
It almost feels like a cheat code for life, doing this, because so few other people are doing it, but it’s not exclusive. You all have the ability to do this.
Though I suppose I can relate. It took me a while to track down good advice, and sort it from the bad. It took awhile to get the advice that would help me apply the other advice (the stuff on motivation, habit change, etc.) and it does take time, learning those “how to apply” skills isn’t instant. I guess it’s a mixture of all the emotional baggage we carry with us, and the difficulty in information overload without a good way to sort it, and all the things in life that distract us almost constantly, that makes it super hard to just sit down with a book or something, read for an hour or two, and commit to adding the one most useful 2 minute habit you can think of, to practice every day.
I’d create something that does that for people, cutting out all the excess research time, distilling advice and vetting sources, and make a lot of money, but I’m certain it already exists, so really I just need to do some curating (which is way easier and less lucrative.) Though I haven’t found anybody who explicitly said they were teaching the skills so you could learn all the other skills. Those skills are pretty specific. From understanding how habit change works, (and doesn’t work) to understanding and dealing with the things that get in the way of doing the most important and useful things, to dealing with setbacks. To maximizing willpower and good choices.
In any case, the active unwillingness to learn often leaves me scratching my head. I can understand feeling like you don’t have the time, but there are a lot of people who wouldn’t do it, even if they did have the time. It’s like...they resent being given advice... hmmm, is this turning back on me? Perhaps it’s the same feeling as the anonymous person: unsolicited advice, even if it’s high quality, can be so abrasivly delivered that it’s almost impossible to listen to it. It’s like, the advice has been laced with the idea that I as a person am inferior, so for me to choose to swallow the advice, I also have to swallow the unstated assertion that I am fundamentally bad, or low or something.
Perhaps that’s what’s going on with other people, all the time, when they hear good advice and don’t follow it? I think it’s more complicated than that, but it makes me think of the debunkers handbook, a short treatise written by climate change scientists, to try and help people who believe in science talk to people who are being super dumb about what they believe (like that climate change is a myth... I wonder if I’m gonna get people angry from saying that... I don’t know who would read my blog who’d be offended by that though...) They collected the scientific research about how people change there minds about things, and it turns out that actually changing people’s beliefs systems is deeply illogical. It’s almost all about emotion. You need a believable alternative story, but it being super scientific is not really gonna help much. That’s why so many people believe things that are so deeply illogical and unscientific: people who have little interest in truth are using the same techniques, to convince them of other things. And they’re better at it, because they’re more used to doing things that way, because they don’t have the science on their side.
And one of the scientific findings is that changing deeply held religious beliefs is just really really hard.
Not that science is infallible: often the unscientific people are quoting their own “scientific studies”, and though most of the time they are using bad science or cherry-picking studies, etc., it is often the case that even what we think is good science, turns out to be not so good. Have you heard of the reproducibility crisis in science today? Especially with social science experiments, but even medical stuff, they are finding that a large number of studies that they thought were sound, cannot be reproduced. Oops!
Even so, science is better than the alternative, (and it’s more reproducible about less squishy subjects, like physics and chemistry and such. And they are going back over things now, at least, to try and weed out things that are not reproducible)
OK, definitely went longer because I had more time. What’s that called? The something paradox? The work expands to fit the time allocated to it? Well, there’s that experiment done. Next time I know it would definitely be valuable to set a timer or something, if I’m hoping to get other stuff done.
Seriously, good grief Charlie Brown, I was trying to do a short bullet-point list and it ended up like a whole other blog post. Or two.
Have a nice week, I will be doing my final Observations (for my Montessori AMI certification) this coming week. Then I can get back to panicking about how much work I have left before my summer classes start. Oh dear. It’s a lot. I’m gonna need to go into emergency mode for the next month and a half, and stop all non-essential activity’s, just focus on being ready as my top priority. Even so, there are so many other balls in the air that I can’t just drop... We’ll see. I need a planning session where I take a cold hard look at exactly how much work I have left to do, double how long I think it will take, and figure out how to give myself that time to work on it. And still keep up the other essential things. To that effect, this may be the last long blog in a while. (If I can help it. Must remember to set a timer, and stick to it!)
Take care, enjoy spring!
-I
Not that science is infallible: often the unscientific people are quoting their own “scientific studies”, and though most of the time they are using bad science or cherry-picking studies, etc., it is often the case that even what we think is good science, turns out to be not so good. Have you heard of the reproducibility crisis in science today? Especially with social science experiments, but even medical stuff, they are finding that a large number of studies that they thought were sound, cannot be reproduced. Oops!
Even so, science is better than the alternative, (and it’s more reproducible about less squishy subjects, like physics and chemistry and such. And they are going back over things now, at least, to try and weed out things that are not reproducible)
OK, definitely went longer because I had more time. What’s that called? The something paradox? The work expands to fit the time allocated to it? Well, there’s that experiment done. Next time I know it would definitely be valuable to set a timer or something, if I’m hoping to get other stuff done.
Seriously, good grief Charlie Brown, I was trying to do a short bullet-point list and it ended up like a whole other blog post. Or two.
Have a nice week, I will be doing my final Observations (for my Montessori AMI certification) this coming week. Then I can get back to panicking about how much work I have left before my summer classes start. Oh dear. It’s a lot. I’m gonna need to go into emergency mode for the next month and a half, and stop all non-essential activity’s, just focus on being ready as my top priority. Even so, there are so many other balls in the air that I can’t just drop... We’ll see. I need a planning session where I take a cold hard look at exactly how much work I have left to do, double how long I think it will take, and figure out how to give myself that time to work on it. And still keep up the other essential things. To that effect, this may be the last long blog in a while. (If I can help it. Must remember to set a timer, and stick to it!)
Take care, enjoy spring!
-I
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